10 thoughts on “Writing Versus Typing”

  1. Yes, I could write things down with a pen, but nobody, including me, would be able to read them afterwards.

  2. When I was in Med School, handwritten was pretty much the only way. And I discovered, that if I was not careful, I could let the information go from the professors notebook, to my notebook, while passing through neither of our brains.

    I had to re-write the notes afterwards to have a clue what was said.

    Later, when I was the professor, students often had laptops…didn’t seem to help them much either.

    1. Yes. The effort of writing degrades your attention. Bit like flying an airplane without autopilot – your IQ seems to drop substantially which may explain the prevalence of dumb pilot tricks.

  3. I hate writing by hand, too. I started typing all my papers beginning in 9th grade. My school had the foresight to require every student to take a semester of typing (this was back in the Dark Ages) so I’ve always been able to touch-type. I was a very slow typist in 9th grade, but it was worth it to avoid laboriously copying it out long hand.

  4. The best I can manage by hand is a laborious print. My script is little better than scribbling.
    My class notes look like shorthand, but are in fact meaningless scribbles.
    I don’t want to talk about my efforts to learn Chinese ideograms.My current desk doesn’t have a space I can curl up into for sobbing.
    When I try to draw, all I can do is rough sketching, something along the lines of what is known as “gesture drawing”. The work is apparently not without appeal, according to teachers and classmates, but precision and detail elude me.
    I can’t even type. My ability to write exploded when text editing came around, because I was no longer troubled by typoes and blunderrs. With mere typing, my white-out bills would be crippling. Again, don’t mention my continually revising thoughts and rearranging paragraphs.
    Text editing is well worth the aching wrists.

  5. Were I to be back in school I’d record every class.

    That way I can pay full attention to what’s being said, but if I miss something anyway I don’t have to spend brain cycles on it in real time: I know I can go to the instant replay later.

  6. Illegibility was born with the ballpoint.* Nib-based ink pens can only be used at the correct slant and orientation, so it forces proper letter formation. Nothing in this silly world is boob-proof, of course, but I still have two Parker cartridge pens bought in 1960, Parker still sells proper cartidges, and both pens still work.

    * PS: modern clay binder pencils also suck, but they still make graphite pencils. I even have some carbon black pencils.

  7. I’ll be the contrarian. I have a commonplace book with me at all times, make extensive handwritten margin notes in every nonfiction book I read, and am in the middle of hand-copying choice notes from old notebooks into a collection of “sayings” of one of my fictional characters (the Silas Hudson stuff I’ve been posting on my blog lately).

    Showed one of the latter to a friend yesterday. He couldn’t get past it being page after page of precise (if somewhat idiosyncratic) engineer’s lettering.

    “they’re just different tools for different jobs”

    Exactly. Writing and typing each have their uses. Several of my friends homeschool. Apparently, a similar difference exists between printing and cursive – each exercises a different part of the brain, cognitively and not just the slightly different motor skills involved.

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